Do you think the HPV vaccine encourages sin?

Question

I just saw this press release from the Liberty Counsel, a conservative Christian legal group that sponsors a "Day of Purity" to encourage teen chastity.

http://www.lc.org/pressrelease/2007/nr010507.htm

The part I find upsetting is that they seem to think something is wrong with giving young women the Gardasil vaccine to prevent HPV. Of *course* abstinence means they won't get HPV, but why deny grls this medical advance or act like it encourages "sin"? Why can't they promote both abstinence *and* the vaccine?

Answer 1

Why doesn't the Liberty Counsel just follow their thinking through to its logical conclusion and deny medical treatment to anyone who becomes infected with an STD? "Let's just let them all rot and die of their illness, yeah, that'll teach 'em!"

I think it's a shame that certain conservative Christian groups see every issue as an opportunity to punish the sinful, rather than as opportunities to produce positive change in the world.

Moreover, abstinence-only education is problematic because adolescents who embrace it end up having oral and anal sex instead and only put off their intercourse for a few years. You can still get an STD through oral sex, so you can see how this would be a problem. Furthermore, when these kids finally do end up having sex, they are usually more likely to have unprotected sex than adolescents who have been educated about condoms.

It's time that Christians step up and take a moral stand on this in order to protect the lives of the next generation. Those who deny the next generation the right to a healthy life have no moral leg to stand on.

Answer 2

Because "abstinence" is a joke that denies people their biological nature. Research (done within and outside of) against the Catholic Church's teaching on this method of birth control, research of kids vs. rates of pregnancy and STDs in these programs DISPROVES that "abstinence" is logic nor does it work. It's a wet dream.

The vaccine is designed to protect women THROUGH their LIFE, which includes after your magical "marital" sex, which you STILL CAN GET from your "monogamous", heterosexual partner and NEVER KNOW it. So if this vaccine is all it claims to be and this religious junk makes it unavailable to women based on such idiotic religious bunk, you're basically advocating that even married women might get cancer from HPV and contract it from their heterosexual, monogamous man. You want to play god games and gamble with people's lives based on illogical madness. Stop the madness and get real.

Answer 3

Because according to Christians, the HPV vaccine is a "permission slip" to do depraved sexual acts, despite the glaring hole in their logic. NOT getting vaccinated does not prevent you from making the exact same choices about sex as you would anyway.

Christianity fails to take personal choice and free will into account, and their argument is ludicrous. That's like saying chemotherapy encourages people to smoke because it cures cancer!

Answer 4

Of course not. That's like saying the tetanus vaccine encourages stepping on rusty nails.

And think about it: how many vaccines did you get as a child without any clue as to what they were for or how you would otherwise catch it? How could getting them encourage you to do anything?

Answer 5

They have their heads stuck up their butts. Rape never occurs to anybody when talking about contraception, or preventing std's. Abstinence is the best way to prevent these things, but kids are not going to start having sex because they had a vaccine that the doctor will tell them only vaccinates them against 3 of dozens of strains of HPV.

Answer 6

The simple fact is that 80% of all women, even those who have only had sex with their husbands, have HPV. It's just that common a thing, and since there is a way to prevent it, young girls should be educated about it.

Answer 7

Those people are interested in controlling what other people do, not with the wellbeing of others. The HPV vaccine prevents cancer. Fighting against it is actually fighting for people to get cancer. If you can do that and sleep at night, whatever code of ethics you follow is deeply, deeply flawed.

Answer 8

Until recently many Catholic hospitals refused to give women in labor any medications for pain relief because they believed the injunction written in Genesis 3, when God said to Eve: "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children."

This and the HPV vaccine criticisms are simply more reasons to discredit the religious right. These positions show that they are insensitive to human suffering and obsessive about their moral ideas about sex. Those irrational positions are piling up faster than the bat guano in Mammoth Cave.

Answer 9

That's just insanity...
The real sin here is that the religious freaks have any hold on the American Medical System at all.

We really need to get all the way back to seperation of church and state... religion has no place in politics.

Answer 10

I'm unsure about the vaccine can you contract HPV without having sex?

Read the article for content...not just with this biased look ...it makes sense. Its true that giving out condoms or other such actions does not guarantee that the child will engage in sexual activity but it does make him/her feel that its ok because people are not telling me not to theyare telling me what to do if I can...

"Television ads encourage parents to vaccinate their 9-12 year old girls with the HPV vaccine, after reporting the shocking statistic that 6.2 million people are infected each year with HPV and an average of 3,700 women die each year in the U.S. from HPV. Not once do those ads mention that HPV is a sexually transmitted disease – in other words, the ads don’t convey the most important information: you can’t contract HPV if you choose to remain sexually pure. "